Rum

Rating:
Summary: A Delight for Serious Drinkers
Review: By Bill Marsano. Rum has been a forgotten drink for some decades now. Just why it fell from favor isn't entirely clear, but now, more or less all of a sudden, it's back. And in comes with this handsome book--a real lapful of pleasure--to do it justice. Certainly the new interest in cocktails of recent years has fostered the comeback, and so has the long-delayed realization that there really isn't any such thing as "rum." Instead, there are many, many rums--each different by style or flavor or the whim of its maker. Rum shows as many personalities as malt scotch does, in fact. Finally, serious drinkers have recognized that while there are plenty of raffish, piratical rums of the "Fifteen Men on a Dead Man's Chest" variety, there are others that are made as carefully and aged and lovingly as fine cognacs.

David Broom is our guide here--he's a good writer (author of numerous other books on fine drink) and a real expert in the realm of distillative arts. Wisely he doesn't try to cover every rum from every place (there are far too many, after all). Instead he focuses on the home country of rum, which is the Caribbean basin and the Spanish Main (which means, of course, mainland, so we get the word on rums from Venezuela, Guatemala, Guyana, Brazil and elsewhere). But he concentrates on the islands: Barbados, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Guadeloupe, Haiti, Jamaica, Martinique, Puerto Rico, St. Lucia, Trinidad, the Virgin Islands (U.S. and British) are of principal importance. And of course there are little oddities. Bermuda has its own famous run but grows no sugar cane; the Caymans are known for what might be called "J. and B."--a blend of Jamaican and Barbadian rums. My personal favorite is what Broom rightly calls the "fearsome" Jack Iron, which comes from Trinidad but is unreasonably popular in Grenada and its sister island of Carriacou. It was also illegal--contraband--at least until recently.

I bring this up to illustrate rum's breadth of personality. Jack Iron is a punishing 151 proof but it has been legalized for sale to Grenada's tourists--they pick it up at the airport as a ruffianly souvenir. But I prefer its contraband version, still smuggled in to Carriacou. Every time I visit I call at a certain saloon in Hillsborough, which is just down the road for that lovely airport that has to have cars and cattle chased off the runway, and after some idle chit-chat I ask the barman if he can sell me a bottle of Jack Iron. "Not the fancy kind," I say. "I want the stuff that comes over in a neighborly kind of way." At which point he'll hand me a clear liquid in a recycled plastic soda bottle. It'll have a cheap black-and-white paper label stuck onto it bearing the name Jack Iron and a skull and crossbones. In short, he'll hand me the real McCoy.

Broom does an excellent job of covering the connoisseur rums that are leading this spirit's resurgence, but he doesn't neglect rum's splendidly disreputable side either. It's importand, even critical to understanding rum becuase rum IS a disreputable drink. It was first made from industrial waste--that's what molasses was, after all. And its roots are sunk deep in the misery of slavery and the woes of drunken sailors.

Broom provides helpful guides to appreciating rum and to individual brands of note. Finally, there's a raft of fine, color-saturated photographs by Jason Lowe, to top off this truly fine book.--Bill Marsano has won a James Beard medal for his writing on wines and spirits.